Jackie Shane was born in Nashville in 1940, where she grew up with her mother, grandfather, and a grandmother who sang “moaning” sad songs as she cleaned the house. Spirituals and blues poured out of their radio by day; at night Jackie tried on her mother’s lipstick and rouge. A pre-puberty Jackie sang high soprano in the choir but later tuned into the ragged, brokenhearted lament of B.B. King’s “Worry, Worry, Worry.” By age 13, she stopped wiping off her mother’s rouge before she walked out the door. As she’d later declare, “I was born a woman in this body.”
By the mid-1960s, in her adopted city of Toronto, the singer had amassed her own following of Jackie Shane wannabes: impeccably made-up transvestites outfitted in glam suits who lined up around the block to see her shows. On posters and fliers, the adjective that would most frequently precede Jackie Shane’s name was “fabulous.” It is this period that is captured—with the raw, vital crackle of a performer at her peak—on Any Other Way, a 25-song double-album set just out from Numero Group. Shane cut the best material of her life in a scorching live 1967 session allegedly inspired by James Brown: Live at the Apollo, included here, that features some of her transformative covers of now-classic soul songs. Any Other Way also includes a half-dozen 45s, a handful of unearthed tracks, and extensive liner notes by Canadian music writer Rob Bowman, who contributes a riveting biography. It’s a worthy treatment for the resurrection of the voice of a trans woman who the world perhaps wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge on her own terms the first time around.
Akin to the recently departed Charles Bradley, Jackie’s songs are laced with an acknowledgment of suffering but emboldened by a remarkable sense of self-possession. Hers is a story stoked by years of deep communion with music and an adventurous adolescence consorting with gamblers, hucksters, and performing in a traveling carnival. Like James Brown, her music is irrefutably dance-inducing. Like Tina Turner, she channeled trauma into triumph. Like Little Richard, she grew up multiple kinds of other in the Jim Crow South: black and gay—for both of them, a fluid, evolving term—and in her case, trans. Little Richard is Shane’s true kindred spirit. One of the first songs Shane sang as a teenager was his “Lucille,” winning a talent show for her rendition of the singer’s cathartic yowl. Shane would eventually study under Little Richard and his band the Upsetters.
But in the early ’70s, at a point in her career when most singers of her talent would have catapulted into fame, Shane disappeared from the public eye. She refused an offer to work with Funkadelic and previously turned down potential deals with Motown and Atlantic. In fact, she retired from music completely, stirring up rumors among her fans of her whereabouts and her possible demise. Fifty years later, Shane is living in Nashville, a recluse from the music world. But she was coaxed out of hiding for this first Jackie Shane–sanctioned release.
“Sticks and Stones,” the opening cut on the album, is an uproarious rebuttal ostensibly delivered to small-minded bullies “tryin’ to break us up.” “I’ve been abused! Deep down in my hearrrrrrrrttt,” Shane sings, punctuating her delivery with a miniature James Brown caterwaul. By the song’s end, she’s already transformed that pain into an unabashed declaration: “I’ve been abused!/...But I love ya.” A couple of songs into Any Other Way, you will very likely have begun to push your furniture to the edges of the room to clear space for a dance floor—to move to the dark, downbeat groove of “Comin’ Down,” or her powerhouse covers of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “You Are My Sunshine,” and “Money (That’s What I Want).”
It is impossible not to wonder why we are just hearing these songs in 2017. Was Jackie right to hide them until now? Would Atlantic and Motown have steered her in Top-40-engineered, watered-down ways? Her poppier tunes, like the eminently catchy “In My Tenement,” have the instant, infectious grab of a classic Ronettes or Shangri-Las hit—but they feel thinner, by comparison, to the full-hearted, soul-bearing weight of songs like “Cruel Cruel World.” As Jackie told it, she didn’t even know what a tenement was. Shane’s talents are better given over to her rendition of “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied),” most famously recorded by Ben E. King and Aretha Franklin; in her hands it’s a ruthless, ruminative, chill-inducing song, summoning sorrow and strength.
Any Other Way’s title song was written by Stax Records musician William Bell, and it feels of a piece with the Memphis label. Lyrically, “Any Other Way” is a song about a broken heart trying to seem tough: “But when you see my baby/Here is what you say/Tell her I wouldn't have it /Any other way.” When it roars out of Shane’s throat, the tune becomes larger still, a fearless song about being true to yourself. “Tell her that I’m happy, tell her that I’m gay,” Shane sang, without needing to add emphasis. On its own terms, “Any Other Way” is Shane’s “I’m Coming Out”—her “Express Yourself,” her “Born This Way”—without the pop or torchy histrionics that prop up latter-day anthems. It draws instead from the pain embedded in its narrative, on the power of its horn line and chorus of backup singers. Released on Sue Records, best known for early-’60s albums by Ike and Tina Turner, “Any Other Way” was a hit on Shane’s home turf, reaching #124 on Billboard’s “Bubbling Under the Hot 100” listing.
Onstage, Jackie didn’t have the flash and swivel of Tina Turner or James Brown. Her own moves, to hear her bandmates tell it, were subtle, nuanced, a perfect foil to the frenetic charge of her music and a reminder of the deeper places from which it originated. Meanwhile, Jackie went into a kind of trance, perhaps called back to the inner pull of the gospel songs on her grandparents’ radio.
But the discovery of these Jackie Shane recordings now feels electric—the sound of a singer who explores the full range of both male and female expression, a transformative definition of what it means to make soul music. Shot through with seemingly innate bravado and the experience of a childhood spent near the pulpit, Shane had a pitch-perfect sense of when to stir up the dance floor, when to bring things down, and when to bring them up again. She teases out the midsection of “Money” with an extended sermon that culminates in yet another galvanizing affirmation that could bend to sexuality, race, or otherness in general: “You know what my slogan is? Baby, do what you want, just know what you’re doing. As long as you don’t force your will and your way on anybody else, live your life because ain’t nobody sanctified and holy.” Preach.
